From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1030316AbVKHTDp (ORCPT ); Tue, 8 Nov 2005 14:03:45 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1030321AbVKHTDo (ORCPT ); Tue, 8 Nov 2005 14:03:44 -0500 Received: from baythorne.infradead.org ([81.187.2.161]:33495 "EHLO baythorne.infradead.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1030316AbVKHTDo (ORCPT ); Tue, 8 Nov 2005 14:03:44 -0500 Subject: Re: [PATCH 06/25] mtd: move ioctl32 code to mtdchar.c From: David Woodhouse To: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?J=F6rn?= Engel Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" , Arnd Bergmann , linux-mtd@lists.infradead.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Christoph Hellwig In-Reply-To: <20051108183339.GB31446@wohnheim.fh-wedel.de> References: <20051105162650.620266000@b551138y.boeblingen.de.ibm.com> <20051105162712.921102000@b551138y.boeblingen.de.ibm.com> <20051108105923.GA31446@wohnheim.fh-wedel.de> <20051108183339.GB31446@wohnheim.fh-wedel.de> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Date: Tue, 08 Nov 2005 19:03:24 +0000 Message-Id: <1131476604.27347.115.camel@baythorne.infradead.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Evolution 2.2.3 (2.2.3-2.fc4) Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-SRS-Rewrite: SMTP reverse-path rewritten from by baythorne.infradead.org See http://www.infradead.org/rpr.html Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Tue, 2005-11-08 at 19:33 +0100, Jörn Engel wrote: > mtdblock.c, while being quite a bit more complicated, does not require > a ton of ioctls, will not confuse users with minor number 7 actually > being device number 3 and magically being read-only despite unix > permissions and hardware properties. MAKEDEV and the documentation and udev ought to be perfectly sufficient to deal with the slight inconvenience caused by the use of minor numbers. The protection afforded by the read-only devices has its uses. > Can you name a few examples, where mtdchar.c makes sense? I've found > it to be quite useless. mtdchar allows you to explicitly control erases and per-byte writes. You can't do that with mtdblock. And you might not even want CONFIG_BLK_DEV enabled. -- dwmw2